Young Patriots at the United Front Against

Fascism Conference, 1969

A speech by William "Preacherman" Fesperman at the 1969 anti-fascism conference held by the

Black Panther Party in Oakland.

Introduction The following speech was given by William “Preacherman” Fesperman at the United Front Against

Fascism Conference held by the Black Panther Party in Oakland from July 18-21, 1969.1 Fesperman

was the field secretary of the Young Patriots Organization (YPO) and a former theology student. The

YPO was a Chicago-based group of poor, white, and revolutionary southern transplants. They played

a crucial role in founding the original 1969 Rainbow Coalition, a groundbreaking alliance initiated by

the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, which also formally included the Puerto Rican street

gang-turned-political organization, the Young Lords, and Rising Up Angry, another group that

appealed to working class white youth. The Young Patriots are also, because of their explicit identifi-

cation as “hillbilly nationalists” and symbolic adoption of the Confederate flag, one of the most fasci-

nating, controversial, and understudied organizations to emerge from the intersection of the New Left

student movement, civil rights movement, Black Power struggles, and new forms of community orga-

nizing that unfolded over the course of the 1960s in urban neighborhoods across the United States.

The lack of attention given to the group is understandable; with the exception of a two-page write-up

included in the New Left collection The Movement Towards a New America, and a brief statement

published at the end of the Black Panthers Speak anthology, very few writings from the YPO are easi-

ly available to the public.2 Moreover, until Amy Sonnie and James Tracy’s 2011 work Hillbilly National-

ists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, a timely study of

radical and anti-racist activism during the 1960s and 70s within working class white communities in

Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, and Jakobi Williams’s recent book From the Bullet to the Ballot:

The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago, one of the

only full accounts of the history of the Chicago Rainbow Coalition, very little in-depth historical care

had been paid to the group.3 Republishing this vital archival text is a small attempt toward filling

said void in the scholarship.

But just as important, we wager that, given renewed attention to racism, the legacies of the South,

and the Confederate flag today, disentangling the visible contradictions of the YPO and analyzing

their role as a key constituency of the Rainbow Coalition can help us demarcate certain positions

within contemporary debates about radical history, organizing strategy, and political identity. In our

current conjuncture, the idea of white and black radicals rallying side-by-side around cries of “Black

Power to black people!” and “White Power to white people!,” as the Chicago Black Panthers and the

Young Patriots did, seems absolutely unthinkable; but to dismiss this as mere anachronism would be

to overlook a pivotal episode in American political activism and thus disregard what “strategic traces”

and resources this experience could hold.4 To be able to investigate the YPO further, and understand

how such a multiracial assemblage of groups like the Rainbow Coalition was possible in the first

place, we should heed the advice of Cha-Cha Jimenez, leader of the Young Lords: “in order to under-

stand [the Young Patriots], you have to understand the influence of nationalism.”5 This also requires

us to chart the specific organizational forms and styles of political work that this nationalism assumed.

***

Formed in 1968, the YPO quite consciously took after the Panthers by combining revolutionary

nationalism and community defense as a political strategy, and in their viewing of the “pig power

structure” as a common enemy for both poor whites and African Americans. The YPO was also

marked by the specific conditions of radical politics in Chicago where the “organize your own” activist

model, famously advocated by SNCC in its later phase, meant not identity-based essentialism but a

forging of connections across class, race, and ethnic lines. This is reflected in the YPO’s own 11-Point

Program, which, while modeled on the original version put forth by the Oakland Panthers, contained a

prominent addition. Following demands for full employment, better housing conditions, prisoners’

rights, and an end to racism, the Patriots also proclaimed that “revolutionary solidarity with all the

oppressed peoples of this and all other countries and races defeats the divisions created by the nar-

row interests of cultural nationalism.” This principle of shared spheres of struggle and a division of

political labor – a relative autonomy or independence at the community level – became driving fea-

tures of the “rainbow politics” developed in Chicago.6 As opposed to the frustrations that many white

radicals expressed concerning the new organizing model proposed by SNCC and other Black Power

groups, the YPO and a broader network of community activists treated it as an opportunity for political

experimentation from their own social position or frame: an opening to collectively think through the

most effective strategies for united action and novel forms of solidarity politics, as well as the con-

struction of participatory projects around the very real and specific problems facing southern migrants

that wouldn’t be easily solved.

These initial considerations generate an obvious question: on what grounds could the Patriots see

themselves as white revolutionary nationalists? How could they claim solidarity with the struggles

being fought in the name of national liberation by oppressed groups at home and abroad? After all,

the YPO’s student activist contemporaries in the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) – a section of

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which later split into the Weather Underground and a num-

ber of organizations in the New Communist Movement – took a radically different approach, theorizing

whiteness as a “ruling-class social control formation” born of strategic alliances consolidated under

the banner of white racial identity. Though these emerging tendencies agreed that whiteness con-

ferred privileges on this sector of the working class, and that such benefits presented a serious obsta-

cle to revolutionary class politics, they disagreed in their strategic assessments of how to proceed.

The Weather Underground advocated for a complete divorce of white revolutionaries from the white

working class. But the rest of RYM, rallied around the future leadership of the Sojourner Truth Organi-

zation, argued that the benefits bestowed by white supremacy ultimately proved to be a trap, a betray-

al of any proletarians’ “real interests.”7 So how did the YPO arrive at and reconcile such a heterodox

position?

The answer lies in the fact that the Patriots had a coherent regional identity around which to organize,

and one with a history that often took on radical political valences: its membership was composed of

southern migrants mainly from Appalachia, whose families had settled in the Uptown neighborhood of

Chicago, a major hub along the northbound route dubbed the “hillbilly highway.” Historically,

Appalachia has had a fraught relationship to other regions of the South, especially in terms of racial

formation and ideological perspective; often, its inhabitants were marked as distinct from other white,

Anglo-Saxon groups, and this produced combative expressions of both “national identity” – as “moun-

tain people” – and at times, expressions of discontent against economic and state authorities and soli-

darity with other oppressed groups.8 In other words, there was a strong understanding of Appalachia

as its own region of the South, and, because of its economic status as one of the most impoverished

areas in the country, there was a general current of class resistance against the massive coal and

power companies that monopolized whole towns and even counties (popularized in films like Mate-

wan and Harlan County, USA). This went the other direction, too: for example, certain Marxist theo-

rists arguing for black self-determination in the South, like Nelson Peery, saw poor Appalachian

whites as a primary basis for unity with the white working class, and counted them as an “Anglo-

American minority” in the “Negro nation.”9 In this reworking and unsettling of racial and national identi-

ty categories, common territory, language, culture, and post-Civil War labor forms became unifying

aspects, rather than color.10

A document from the Southern Conference Educational Fund, a social justice and anti-racist organi-

zation led by Carl and Anne Braden, with a project-oriented approach patterned after SNCC, showed

how far an understanding of the relations of oppression prevailing among poor white communities had

progressed by the 1960s, with a practically anti-imperialist bent:

Appalachia is a colony, lying mostly in the Southern United States. Its wealth is owned by people who

live elsewhere and who pay little or no local taxes… Like all colonies, Appalachia is run by men and

women beholden to the absentee owners and the banks. Judges, sheriffs, tax assessors, prosecu-

tors, and state officials are tied to the coal operators in one way or another. These people led the dri-

ve to stop union organizing in the mountains in the 20 and 30s, and they now lead the fight against

organizing white and black people for political and economic power.11

Still, the composition of this “internal colony” had been changing for some time: between 1930 into the

late 1960s, millions of southerners traveled to Northern industrial cities in search of work. Appalachia

was especially transformed soon after WWII when a wave of automation and mechanization swept

through the coal mining industries in West Virginia and Kentucky, leaving rampant unemployment and

poverty in its wake.12 For those who left, the trip to the North did not ease these difficulties. Cities like

Chicago and Detroit each faced their own problems: in the context of emergent processes of deindus-

trialization, work was often hard to find for many newcomers.13 Migrants faced scrutiny from state

authorities, law enforcement, and other residents, with accusatory and sensationalist Chicago Tribune

exposés labelling them as “one of the most dangerous and lawless elements of Chicago’s fast grow-

ing migrant population,” and police captains demanding they be expelled from the neighborhood.

Additionally, the housing situation in Uptown was deplorable. Single-room tenement houses were

carved out of larger homes, with speculators and landlords paying little attention to real living condi-

tions. Bob Lee, a Black Panther organizer who would be integral to formalizing the Rainbow Coalition,

remembers these as “some of the worst slums imaginable,” even when compared to the African

American-concentrated areas of the South Side; a Harper’s Magazine profile of Uptown was even

more blunt, describing the neighborhood “as the most congested whirlpool of white poverty in the

country.”14

The people who moved to Uptown did not leave everything behind, bringing their own cultural forms

which were only reinforced due to the skepticism and outright prejudice they experienced. The area

soon garnered comparisons to a “Hillbilly Harlem,” and the popular pastimes of Appalachia – pool

halls, honky tonks, barbeques, country and bluegrass music – became points of community pride.

Navigating this cultural landscape was vital to indigenous activists, and the young YPO organizers

possessed a unique ability to draw upon the political potential and roots of these establishments and

practices.15

This isn’t to say that a shared sense of resentment simmering among Uptown residents didn’t exist

already: faced with discriminatory hiring practices and welfare policies, constant police harassment,

and housing displacement through urban renewal projects, the southern migrant community in Chica-

go proved that even in purportedly homogeneous white communities, there were layers of stigmatiza-

tion and processes of class stratification. As historian Jennifer Frost notes,

Whites, too, shared a consciousness based on whiteness, but the white identity of southern and

Appalachian migrants in [Chicago and elsewhere] was complicated by class, as they were seen as

“white trash” and “dumb hillbillies.” In fact, well before SDS arrived in Uptown, residents had carried

signs declaring “hillbilly power” at a local protest. Community participants… did not think of them-

selves as “poor,” but “as a Negro who is poor or a Hillbilly who is poor.”16

Encounters with the existing political apparatus made it evident that municipal government was a limit,

not a route, towards enhancing this power. As even the smallest attempts at changing local conditions

could be blocked by the overwhelming forces of Mayor Richard Daley’s electoral machine, a new poli-

tics of community empowerment began to coalesce and constituted a specific but malleable organiza-

tional form and a range of insurgent practices that could connect issues of neighborhood improve-

ment with better access to social services.17 Thus, a new front of struggle materialized, and offered

unique opportunities for heightening the political capacities, awareness, and activity of grassroots

forces.18

One of the vehicles for building this kind of community power in Uptown came, paradoxically, through

the participation of outside student activists from SDS, albeit those from a different political milieu and

ideological background than others who would go on to form the RYM theoretical current.19 These

earlier members of SDS would help form the JOIN (Jobs or Income Now) Community Union in 1964,

which was the Chicago chapter of SDS’s Economic Research Action Project (ERAP), one of the first

large-scale community-organizing efforts of the New Left. The initial ideas for ERAP stemmed from

the broadly Keynesian precepts shared by the first leaders and theorists of SDS, chiefly Tom Hayden,

and its first strategic plans included organizing unemployed young men across the country, calling for

full employment and/or guaranteed wages on a national scale, and, more generally, advocating

democratic planning within the economic sphere. All these steps were intended to lay the groundwork

for an “interracial movement of the poor.”

But activists soon discovered that such conceptions were more difficult to carry out in practice. They

hit a wall trying to frame unemployment as a directly relatable issue. Where JOIN found greater suc-

cess, however, was in engaging community concerns, or “immediate grievances”: welfare rights,

housing issues, police brutality, to name a few. This shift towards addressing inadequate city and

social services invited a high degree of skepticism from SDS members who wanted to keep pushing a

national program, and they snidely nicknamed the new locally-focused approach GROIN (Garbage

Removal or Income Now).20 In other words, many student leaders did not see any political content to

these felt grievances.

Despite the pushback, the new strategic orientation, which responded to tangible social struggles on

the ground, turned the Uptown Chicago JOIN initiative into a larger neighborhood-wide, and indeed

city-wide, project. It was obvious that the political terrain had shifted, and that, to use Ira Katznelson’s

terms, the “politics of community” could more successfully tap into already existing sources of political

activism than the “politics of work” approach taken by ERAP.21 Following a broader trend, organizing

issues proposed by community residents themselves – welfare rights, voter registration and educa-

tion, public education issues, housing problems – opened up new possibilities for political awareness,

especially following the often lackluster and highly restrictive implementation of many War on Poverty

programs.22

Student organizers found indigenous leadership already present in Uptown, as some community

members had direct experiences in the Civil Rights movement in the South and were ready to mobi-

lize others around issues of racial discrimination. Support of black-led organizations and a consistent

emphasis on anti-racist work were a key part of JOIN’s outlook and message, and the organization

linked up with Martin Luther King’s first campaigns in 1966 to desegregate housing and schools in the

city by participating in the Open Housing Marches (which encountered intense reactionary violence in

the majority white suburbs). These new neighborhood-based activists included Peggy Terry, Rennie

Davis, Dovie Thurman, Mary Hockenberry, and Jean Tepperman. Terry in particular became a highly

respected community leader – a seasoned activist who took after Anne Braden, and a former member

of CORE (and future vice-presidential candidate on a ticket with Eldridge Cleaver for the Peace and

Freedom Party), Terry assumed a mentorship role for young members who would go on to join the

Young Patriots Organization, not unlike Ella Baker’s relationship with members of SNCC.

Rent strikes and tenant occupations become effective tactics to leverage power against absentee

landlords and indifferent housing boards. There was a proliferation of community-based projects: a

JOIN community school was set up, where student organizers tried to tie problems in Uptown to

national political and economic trends in discussion with residents. Student organizers and neighbor-

hood activists formed a welfare committee, which contested rules around privacy, dispensation of

funds, and aid revocation, and eventually won key protections for day laborers – a pressing question

in Uptown. Terry also became the editor of a newspaper, The Firing Line, which relayed information

about various Black Power movements, the war in Vietnam, and national liberation struggles abroad,

including the struggle in Ireland.

While this encounter between student activists and neighborhood people eventually disintegrated in

1967 because of the failure of the ERAP project and demands from Uptown residents for greater

autonomy, it also enabled more radical currents to emerge, including the Young Patriots. The roots of

the YPO can be traced to the anti-police brutality committee of JOIN, founded in 1966. In fact, this

work group was the Uptown Goodfellows, what Tracy and Sonnie describe as a “cross between a

street gang and loose-knit radical social club.” Composed mainly of young men, these were also

some of the most vocal critics of overbearing SDS involvement in JOIN. Members included Jimmy

Curry, Doug Youngblood (the son of Peggy Terry) Junebug Boykin, and Hy Thurman, patient and

skilled organizers all. Their central issue and focus was a salient one; police harassment was a ubiq-

uitous, quotidian phenomenon in Uptown, and JOIN members had already set up an informal police

watch and conducted several independent inquiries, with local help, into Uptown residents’ run-ins

with police.

Like many youth gangs in Chicago of the period, including the Black Gangster Disciples and the

Blackstone Rangers, the Goodfellows had an explicitly political message that went beyond turf skir-

mishes: to unite and coordinate with other local gangs, whatever their race or ethnicity, by fighting

back against police harassment and intimidation – the most visible manifestation of the “real enemy,”

i.e., corrupt politicians, capitalism, and the war. On this point, the Goodfellows bucked a dominant his-

torical trend by openly aligning themselves with black or brown-led gangs and social organizations,

since there is a long-established legacy in the United States of youth of color forming themselves into

gangs as a measure of collective self-defense against violence and abuse carried out against them by

not only the police, but by both white youth and white adult gangs.23

This nascent coalition-building came to fruition in August 1966 when, with the help of other JOIN

activists, the Goodfellows organized a march with white, African American, and Puerto Rican youth on

a local police station to protest police violence, ending with calls for community control of police. While

the march proved that poor whites could play an active role in political organizing with other

oppressed communities, it also helped to spark a wave of police attention towards the Goodfellows,

foreshadowing the even more violent reaction that would befall the Rainbow Coalition.

The Patriots officially came together as an independent organization in 1968, with Boykin and Young-

blood as de facto leaders. The YPO adopted the community concerns that JOIN confronted and rein-

forced their identity as southern migrants, or “dislocated hillbillies.” As Tracy and Sonnie put it, this

was meant to be “an organization of, by and for poor whites.”24 Their identification as an oppressed

community, however, was constructed through a militant opposition to capitalism and constant agita-

tion against racism, a real problem in Uptown (Bob Lee notes that even with its legacy of activism, the

neighborhood was a “prime recruiting ground for white supremacists”). The cultural spaces of Uptown

– pool halls, street corners, bars – became spaces for political work, as the Patriots practiced a “peda-

gogy of the streets,” venturing out and meeting community members in familiar locations where they

socialized and might be more likely to discuss their problems and ideas for change.25 And, again fol-

lowing the lead of both JOIN and the Panthers, a newspaper, The Patriot (with the subtitle: People’s

News Service), was also regularly printed and distributed. After an influx of new members, including

William Fesperman, the YPO soon made contact with the Panthers, and by the spring of 1969, the

preconditions of the Rainbow Coalition were in place.

The first meetings between the Panthers and the Patriots in early 1969 had Lee, a core organizer in

the Chicago Panthers, travelling to Uptown in order to meet and discuss shared experiences,

demands, and goals. Things did not always go smoothly, and Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chica-

go Panthers, did not even immediately know about Lee’s trips to try and form an alliance. A critical

juncture came, unsurprisingly, through a confrontation with the repressive arm of the state: one night

after Lee left a meeting with the YPO, only to be immediately apprehended by police and herded into

the back of a cop car. Witnessing this egregious instance of profiling and harassment, Fesperman

gathered every person he could – not only other Young Patriot members but also their partners and

children – to surround the car and force the police to release Lee on the spot. These minor battles

and acts of solidarity reinforced the mutual respect the two organizations had for each other.

Some of the Panther/Patriot meetings were captured in the film American Revolution 2, showing Lee

succinctly summing up the need for political unity between the groups: “there’s police brutality, there’s

rats and roaches, there’s poverty up here, and that’s the first thing we can unite on.” Principles of rev-

olutionary solidarity were linked to building an alliance between economically disadvantaged groups.

For the Patriots and Panthers, “poor people’s power” was a form of class power. This meant taking

matters into their own hands and reinventing tried and true tactics. At the end of the scene, a decision

is made for several Uptown residents and Young Patriots to show up unannounced at an upcoming

Model Cities meeting to voice their concerns about how government funds were distributed, and how

many felt shut out of having any say in how the new antipoverty programs in Chicago were being

managed, reprising a fundamental concern and strategy of JOIN.

Concrete demands would lay the basis for linking local bases of power together, that is, for constructing

multiracial solidarity across poor, working-class communities in Chicago – among these southerners,

Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and African Americans. Other organizations in the Rainbow Coalition were

won over by the YPO’s ability to put the guiding line of “serving the people” into practice, and the

Lords, Panthers, and Patriots collaborated on several initiatives while also remaining focused on their

own neighborhood work. Political education classes, a “Rainbow food program” that provided free

breakfasts and meals to families around the Chicago area, and campaigns against urban renewal

were just some of the collaborative projects that the Coalition members embarked upon. Housing and

healthcare constituted the two of the most intense and protracted sites of struggle.

The YPO already had experience in anti-gentrification struggles; in 1968, Uptown community mem-

bers, many of whom participated in JOIN, had fought against a proposal to direct federal funds

towards the construction of a junior college, Truman College, in Uptown, which would displace thou-

sands of southern migrant residents. In response, they proposed their own building plan for the area

in question, accordingly named “Hank Williams Village.” This was to be a mixed-use community space

modeled after the southern towns Uptown residents knew well, and was to contain accessible parks,

day care centers, clinics, and enough housing to minimize displacement. The proposal was rejected,

but delayed the opening of Truman College; the Young Patriots channeled this experience by partici-

pating, alongside the Young Lords and the Poor People’s Coalition, in a building occupation protest-

ing a proposed expansion of McCormick Theological Seminary which would require the abolition of

nearby low-income housing, much like the Truman proposal. This actually resulted in a victory, and

the Patriots lent assistance to other building and land occupations, including some carried out by

American Indian activists from Uptown’s sizable Native American population.

The network of free health clinics set up by the different Coalition groups was another admirable

endeavor. Health politics and care access had always been a problem for poor communities, and

Uptown was no different. Encounters with doctors and the healthcare system in general were often

experienced as coercive and oppressive, and with the input of Terry, the Patriots strove to provide

community health care by opening a free clinic that offered people some basic dignity. Staffed by

activist doctors, the Patriots’ clinic was an impressive community-run solution that tried to demystify

the medical experience for poor whites; it also, like the Panthers’ and Young Lords’ own clinics, came

under constant surveillance from the Board of Health and law enforcement. There were numerous

crackdowns, and soon mounting legal costs were enough to close the clinics down.

With these material and often novel practices of revolutionary solidarity, there came an accompanying

political vocabulary, assembled and reworked from existing lexicons. The organizational form of the

Coalition, as a multiracial front, meant that a shorthand color-coding system was put in place to

denote its constituent elements. These were representatives of colonized communities, and their par-

ticular efforts toward self-determination contributed to the broader tapestry of revolutionary struggle, in

the United States and abroad. Whence comes the roll-call of nods and overtures Fesperman gives to

both homegrown and international figures of this struggle near the end of his speech: “Red Power to

Sittin’ Bull, to Geronimo, Kathy Riteger in Uptown. And yellow power to Ho Chi Minh and Mao and the

National Liberation Front. And Brown Power to Fidel and Che and the Young Lords and La Raza and

Tijerina. And Black Power to the Black Panther Party.” The following line, however, is one that is quite

discordant to our contemporary radical sensibilities, shows why some were hesitant to immediately

ally themselves with the Patriots: “And white power to the Young Patriots and all other white revolu-

tionaries.”

Of course, Fesperman did not advocate any form of white supremacy. Indeed, the phrase “white pow-

er” was a commonly heard expression in speeches by various members of the Illinois Panthers, even

Hampton. In the specific context of the Rainbow Coalition, “white power” was simply “hillbilly power,”

the particular form of revolutionary solidarity that poor whites contributed to the coalition with African

Americans and Latinos, and who confronted similar economic and political conditions. The overarch-

ing political slogan of these groups was “All Power to the People,” with “the people” working as a bind-

ing or articulating category rather than a divisive one.26 These were codewords – crucial pieces of

political jargon – for the practice of class struggle, as Lee and other veteran activists have reiterated.

An Uptown resident and member of JOIN accurately captured this sentiment: “Just because we are

poor, we should not have to live in slums and be pushed around because we are Puerto Rican, Mexi-

can, hillbillies or colored.”27

Other features of the Patriots’ approach induced more deserved puzzlement and even anger, specifi-

cally their appearance: it’s well-known that the battle flag of the Confederacy was at first an integral

part of the YPO’s image, both as a provocation to other groups on the Left and as a mode of popular

outreach to other southerners. The raw shock effect of this usage could be jarring: photographs from

the United Front Against Fascism conference show members of the Panthers’ security detail standing

side-by-side with members of the Patriots dressed in denim jackets, Confederate flag patches stitched

across their backs.

As the Patriots would themselves later recognize, this usage of the Southern Cross was a political

error and deserving of thorough criticism. Still, the reasons behind the adoption of this emblem – a

universal symbol of white supremacy, a real material reminder of the tortured history of racial violence

and brutal after-effects of slavery in the United States – were related to an attempt to understand

politically the racialization of the category of ‘hillbillies,” and therefore need to be considered in a

nuanced fashion.

The Patriots’ appropriation of the rebel flag was related to a specific analysis of the Civil War as an

intra-elite conflict: a “pissing match” or clash between a feudalistic, slave-holding southern planting

class and Northern bourgeois industrialists, which then produced the civilizational divide between

North and South.28 By using this symbolism, they were attempting to scramble the flag’s sedimented,

accumulated meanings – a taking back of Southern history from below. Even as we disagree

absolutely with the adoption of the particular symbol, the attempt to disrupt commonsensical assump-

tions about the clear-cut character of the Civil War (as an “incomplete bourgeois revolution,” for exam-

ple) opens up avenues of historical inquiry. Appalachia especially was one of the most divided areas

in the nation in terms of allegiances to the North and South due to the fact that it was not economical-

ly dependent on slavery and staple crops, and mountain partisans on both sides engaged in protract-

ed guerilla tactics. Unionist and Confederate support varied almost county to county, and the war

irrevocably altered kinship bonds and dynamics along class and community lines.29

As historians like Stephanie McCurry have shown, the Confederacy itself was rocked by profound

insurgent movements from those it had politically dispossessed and disenfranchised: from poor white

and yeoman women who triggered an intense wave of food riots in 1863, to the acts of slave resis-

tance that commenced on Confederate plantations.30 Other recent scholarship has traced a complex

network of collaboration between black people in the Appalachian highlands ‒ either settled freed-

men, enslaved persons, or escaped slaves ‒ and Confederate deserters and escaped Union prison-

ers of war, who found safe havens in these remote mountain and borderland communities and shared

resources and information.31 These instances of contentious politics within the Confederacy where

black and white southerners struggled against oppression were the threads the Patriots sought to

emphasize and rediscover.

In addition, the Patriots idolized John Brown and were well acquainted with Du Bois’s Black Recon-

struction and Liston Pope’s Millhands and Preachers; all of these ideas and events were folded

together in their broader view of a radical Southern history. Indeed, the Patriots were not the only

ones to try and rework the meaning of the Confederate flag for social justice causes at the time: the

Southern Student Organizing Committee, a group from Nashville inspired by SNCC, used a drawing

of black and white hands superimposed over the Confederate flag as their logo in a bid to highlight

their Southern orientation and roots.32 By this logic, the South’s “spirit of rebellion” represented by the

flag was something to be proud of, but its real and discontinuous historical manifestations were those

of poor people’s revolt and cross-racial solidarity.

By 1970, the flag symbol was dropped, on account that there was “no socialist justification for a revo-

lutionary group using a symbol of counterrevolution.”33 The YPO underwent an organizational split, as

well. Some members, like Youngblood, remained in Chicago and retained the Young Patriots name

and would carry on doing local activist work together for a short time longer; others, including Fesper-

man, felt that the brutal police repression in Chicago, which had taken the lives of several Patriots

members and, most famously, Fred Hampton, had taken too drastic of a turn, and that it was time to

form a more national presence. The latter group rebranded itself as the Patriot Party and set up head-

quarters in New York City. While there was some initial success in opening several new Patriot chap-

ters across the country, from Eugene, Oregon (which boasted a Free Lumber program) to upstate

New York, it too ultimately dissolved under the pressures of state violence, investigative scrutiny, and

mounting legal fees.

With current calls to rethink questions of solidarity work and multiracial coalition-building in the con-

temporary moment, a serious retrospective consideration of the Young Patriots and their political

experience with the Rainbow Coalition – both their advances and missteps – might remind us of the

ever-urgent need to articulate new languages and coordinate novel approaches within social move-

ments. Poor rural whites still constitute a major target of the carceral state, and even with the major

reorganizations in the relationships of race and class between black, brown, and white working class

communities witnessed over the past few decades, the focus the Young Patriots put on the deleteri-

ous effects of brutal policing methods and the lack of control over federal service programs within

their own social base, as an effective ground for strategic alliances, is as relevant as ever. As they put

it themselves:

We’re sick and tired of certain people and groups telling us “there ain’t no such thing as poor and

oppressed white people”… The so-called movement better begin to realize, that – first of all – we’re

human beings, we’re real; second – we’ve always been here, we didn’t just materialize; and third –

we’re not going away, even if you choose not to admit we exist.34

— Patrick King

You can read more about the history of the Young Patriots and the Original Rainbow Coalition here.

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Young Patriots at the United Front Against Fascism Conference Saturday, July 19, 1969

Listen here. I’m gonna say it. Turn off your tape recorders. Listen here, out there motherfucker.

FREE HUEY.

We have a message from the people and the message from the people reads: “To you astro-pigs:

‘The moon belongs to the people.’”

We have another message to PL and that message reads, “PL, and Oakland City Council, Chicago

City Council, and the government of the United States, all are paper pigs.”

Now, we have come from Chitown and we come from a monster. And the jaws of the monster in

Chicago are grinding up the flesh and spitting out the blood of the poor and oppressed people, the

blacks in the Southside, the Westside; the browns in the Northside; and the reds and the yellows; and

yes, the whites – white oppressed people. You talk about have any white people before ever known

what oppression is? Come to uptown Chicago. Five pig cars on a square block. White pigs murdering,

brutalizing white brothers. Is it? Is it? Is it? We say, we talk to people a lot, and they say, “You hillbil-

lies ain’t planning on picking up a gun or anything are ya? I mean, that one you brought from Ken-

tucky, or North Carolina.” And we say to ‘em, “Listen here, why, you know, a gun ain’t nothing,” you

know. A gun on the side of a pig means two things: it means racism and it means capitalism. And the

gun on the side of a revolutionary, on the side of the people, means solidarity and socialism. Right

on? Now, who in here and who out there is gonna let the motherfucker with the gun shootin’ capital-

ism and racism outshoot the people? Who’s gonna do it? Who is the racist dog? Let him walk up here

and let me bite his head off. Let me get a hold of that son-of-a-bitch and you can beep it out if you

want to. And Beep out Johnny Cash, you know, cause he tells the truth. When I get in front of McClel-

lan, on behalf of the Southern people, on behalf of all people, I’m gonna bite his head off, and spit it in

Nixon’s face.

Understand where we’re comin’ from when we talk about freein’ political prisoners. Because when we

talk about that, we talking about concentration camps like Folsom Prison, San Quentin, Cook County

Jail in Chicago and Statesville and we’re talking about the Chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illi-

nois, my brother, who was sent down the river for 2 to 5 years for supposedly selling $71 worth of ice

cream. Now, listen here, and I say this, see, because I think we have to deal straight, see and the

judge who sent that brother is a nigger.

Free all political prisoners. We said to the city of Chicago, this is what we said to ‘em. Mayor Daley

declared a war on gangs, you know, so we said, “We didn’t know any gangs fed 4,000 children a

week.” And Mayor Daley’s talking about “feeding the hungry if we can find them.” And the people

know they’re there because that’s the people. We stood up to lame-brained Daley, and we said, “Look

here, man, you sent Chairman Fred off on 2 to 5 years and we got together, the Young Lords, the

Young Patriots and the Black Panther Party in Illinois, we said, ‘Now what are we gonna do?’ We

said, ‘We’re gonna intensify the struggle, motherfucker.’” We also said, “If Chairman Fred don’t get

sent down the river, if I get blowed away, or if I don’t get blowed away, we still gonna intensify the

struggle.” So, what did Mayor Daley do after shakin’ in his boots and oinkin’ right on, right on.

Now ya talk about fascism. I’ll tell you that since we all been in the Patriots the pigs don’t like it. You

know that people being fed in uptown Chicago were the southern whites cause they don’t want to see

any riot in a southern white ghetto. They don’t want to see that. You know, that’d wipe that moon shot

off the front page, you know. Forget about that moon. It’s here.

Since we been in this thing, and really, we’ve been in it all our lives, coming from the South and

comin’ from the damn coal mines, mill towns, and some of them down there ain’t even up to capital-

ism yet. They’re still back, way back to feudalism or something, you know. But, a Chicago pig, he has

a loud oink, but let me tell you, you know, the people from the south, the white brothers and the black

brothers, we’ve been to a lot of hog killings in our lives and I don’t know, but a lot of experience there

and I think about ol’ Hammerhead Superpig Hoover. You know, he’s old, I don’t even want to eat

them chitterlings out of that motherfucker. Fuck it.

Our struggle is beyond comprehension to me sometimes and I felt for a long time and other brothers

in uptown felt that poor whites was (and maybe we felt wrongly, but we felt it) forgotten, and that cer-

tain places we walked there were certain organizations that nobody saw us until we met the Illinois

Chapter of the Black Panther Party. “Let’s put that theory into practice about riddin’ ourselves of that

racism.” You see, otherwise, otherwise to us, freeing political prisoners would be hypocrisy. That’s

what it’d be. We want to stand by our brothers, dig? And, I don’t know, I’d even like to say something

to church people, I think one of the brothers last night sad, “Jesus Christ was a bad motherfucker.”

Man, we all don’t want to go that route, understand. He laid back and he said, “Put that fuckin’ nail

right there man. That’s the people’s nail. I’m takin’ it.” But we’ve gone beyond it, and all we’ve got to

say from the Young Patriots, where we come from, where we’re goin’ is to all of you, and thousands

of others here and all over the world. All we got to say is, “All Power Belongs To The People.” Red

Power to Sittin’ Bull, to Geronimo, Kathy Riteger in Uptown. And yellow power to Ho Chi Minh and

Mao and the National Liberation Front. And Brown Power to Fidel and Che and the Young Lords and

La Raza and Tijerina. And Black Power to the Black Panther Party. And white power to the Young

Patriots and all other white revolutionaries. Whether the pigs or the pig power structure likes it or not,

fuck it.

This speech was originally published in The Black Panther, Saturday, July 26th, 1969. page 8.

1. For more information on the UFAF conference and its immediate aftermath, see Joshua Bloom

and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 299-

301. ↩

2. Barbara Joyce, “Young Patriots,” in The Movement Towards a New America: The Beginnings of

a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970), 547-548; The

Patriot Party. “The Patriot Party Speaks to the Movement,” in The Black Panthers Speaks, ed.

Philip S. Foner (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1995), 239-243. ↩

3. Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power:

Community Organizing in Radical Times (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011); a condensed version

of Sonnie’s and Tracy’s book can be found in James Tracy, “Rising Up: Poor, White, and Angry

in the New Left,” in The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, ed. Dan Berger (New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 2010), 214-230. More information on the Patriots can also be found in

Gordon Keith Mantler, Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic

Justice, 1960-1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 231-233 sqq. Mantler

is critical about what he sees as the “contingent” nature of the Rainbow Coalition, as the organi-

zations involved faced different problems according to their constituencies, neighborhoods, etc.,

and thus often had dissenting views on the primary fronts of struggle. The African American

community in Chicago, for example, did not experience the same pressures stemming from

urban renewal plans like the Puerto Rican and Appalachian populations did. While this is certain-

ly a fair critique of idealized retrospective looks of the Coalition, a careful investigation of its

internal composition, dynamics, and insurgent practices can function as a rebuttal against

accounts, like those of James Miller and Sidney Tarrow, that see social movements in post-68,

post-Democratic National Convention Chicago as following a dynamic that fragmented into “con-

geries of smaller single-issue movements.” See James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets; From

Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 317, and Sidney

Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1997), 150. ↩

4. I address this point in more detail below, but the political vocabulary that permeated the Chicago

activist scene and the Rainbow Coalition was replete with these kinds of declarations. One of

Fred Hampton’s most circulated speeches, “Power Anywhere There’s People,” contains one

variant of this revolutionary nationalist language that emphasized the need for multiracial work-

ing class unity: ”That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower

class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about

the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too…We’re gonna fight

racism with solidarity.” On the concept of “strategic traces,” see Bloom and Martin, op. cit., 20,

405, n.34. ↩

5. Sonnie and Tracy, 77. ↩

6. For more on this question of revolutionary solidarity and the Rainbow Coalition, see Johanna

Fernández, “Denise Oliver and the Young Lords: Stretching the Political Boundaries of Struggle,”

in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, eds. Dayo F.

Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 271-293. ↩

7. For a richer historical account of these debates see Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolu-

tion: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization 1969-1986 (Oakland: AK Press, 2012). The

most important texts in this debate were collected by Paul Saba, ed. The Debate Within SDS:

RYM II vs. Weathermen (Detroit: Radical Education Project, 1969). The quotations originate

from one essay in that collection: Noel Ignatin’s [Ignatiev] “Without a Science of Navigation We

Cannot Sail the Stormy Seas, or Sooner or Later One of Us Must Know.” ↩

8. The classic account of Appalachia as an idea and discourse remains Henry D. Shapiro,

Appalachia on Our Mind: the Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Conscious-

ness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). For interesting explo-

rations of the roles of poor whites had both in forms of slave control but also slave resistance,

and the fears that these potential alliances stirred among the ruling classes, see John Inscoe,

“Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Southern Appalachia: Myths, Realities and Ambigui-

ties,” in Appalachia in the Making, eds. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 103-131; Jeff Forret, Race Relations at

the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 115-156; also cf. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro

Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 360-367. ↩

9. See Nelson Peery, The Negro National-Colonial Question (Chicago. Workers Press, 1978). ↩

10. For more on this point, see Robin D.G. Kelley and Betty Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and

Black Revolution,” Souls 1 (Fall 1999), 6-41, 27. ↩

11. Southern Conference Educational Fund pamphlet, in The Movement Towards a New America:

The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970),

261-262. For an similarly interesting, if dated, take on this internal colony analysis for Appalachia

that more explicitly incorporates insights from dependency theory and theorists of decoloniza-

tion, see Keith Dix, “Appalachia: Third World Pillage,” Antipode 5.1 (March 1973), 25-30, which

summarizes some of the work done by the People’s Appalachia Research Collective and their

journal, People’s Appalachia. ↩

12. SDS did make some inroads organizing in Appalachia with the Economic Action and Research

Project, explained below. The balance sheets written by veteran activists of their successes and

failures in the poverty-stricken mining community of Hazard, Kentucky, remain essential docu-

ments to revisit: see Hamish Sinclair, “Hazard, Ky.: Document of the Struggle,” Radical America

11.1 (January-February 1968), 1-24, and Peter Wiley, “The Hazard Project: Socialism and Com-

munity Organizing” in the same issue, 25-37. The SCEF set up its own project along the same

lines, the Southern Mountain Project, with a special emphasis on connecting the issues of work-

ing-class rights to the continuing struggles of African-Americans, or as they put it: “helping some

of the poorest people in America build on the experiences of the Southern freedom movement to

organize for political and economic power.” On this and the legacy of the Bradens, see Cather-

ine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold

War South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006). ↩

13. On this other “Great Migration” of poor whites to the North and Midwest, see Jacqueline Jones,

The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic

Books, 1992), and Chad Berry , Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illi-

nois Press, 2000). ↩

14. Sonnie and Tracy, op. cit., 21. An early, oral history-focused survey of the transformation of

Uptown, conducted by two SDS organizers, is Todd Gitlin and Nancy Hollander, Uptown: Poor

Whites in Chicago (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971). A more recent and culturally oriented

study can found in Roger Guy, Diversity in Unity: Southern and Appalachian Migrants in Uptown

Chicago, 1950-1970 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). ↩

15. Indigenous is used here both in terms of an approach to studying social movements “from

below,” as popularized by Aldon Morris in his The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black

Communities Organizing For Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), and to signal the problem

of forming leadership from the constituents or members of dominated or oppressed communi-

ties, through a participatory process of activism that raises their sense of political understanding

and awareness. For more on this term, its broadly Gramscian connotations, and its currency in

the Civil Rights movement through figures like Ella Baker, see Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker &

The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 2003), 273-298, 357-374. For some problems in how this ideal has played itself

out in protest movements before, during, and after the 60s, see Francesca Polleta, Democracy

is an Endless Meeting: Freedom in American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of Califor-

nia Press, 2002). ↩

16. Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 114-115. ↩

17. Besides Frost, two major resources for the history of community organizing in the United States

are Wini Breines, Community Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968 (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 1989), and Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in

America (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994). Also Alyosha Goldstein’s recent book, Poverty

in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century (Durham: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2012). ↩

18. Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search For Black Power in the 20th Century (Lon-

don: Routledge, 2014); cf. Peniel Joseph, “Community Organizing, Grassroots Politics, and

Neighborhood Rebels: Local Struggles for Black Power in America,” introduction to Neighbor-

hood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level, ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 1-

19. ↩

19. On ideological shifts within SDS, see Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: The Rise and Development of the

Students for a Democratic Society (New York: Random House, 1973). ↩

20. A sober reflective account of these strategic revisions is Richard Rothstein, “ERAP: Evolution of

the Organizers,” Radical America 2.2 (May-June 1968), 1-18. See also his “Short History of

ERAP,”available at the SDS documents archive. ↩

21. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 24-26. ↩

22. For comparable processes and events in Oakland, which provided the immediate context for the

rise and decline of the Black Panther Party there, see Robert O . Self, American Babylon: Race

and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). The classic

account of these concerns in 1960s activism, especially the problem of organization-building

through individual and collective grievances, which touches upon the same problematic encoun-

tered by ERAP and JOIN, remains Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s

Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979), especially 284-288,

296-308. ↩

23. I owe this point to discussions with Delio Vasquez and his unpublished paper “Criminalized Poli-

tics and Politicized Crime: Illegal Black Resistance in the 1960s and 70s,” delivered at the UC-

Santa Cruz Friday Forum for Graduate Research, February 13th, 2015. ↩

24. Sonnie and Tracy, op. cit., 72. ↩

25. The phrase is Sonnie and Tracy’s, but points to a real definitional problem in how we conceptu-

alize the boundaries of political work and processes of political education. ↩

26. See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), 67-128. ↩

27. Frost, 116. ↩

28. Sonnie and Tracy, 76. More extensive analyses of the Civil War existed on the New Left, and

would flourish in the New Communist Movement, with Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev’s forma-

tive account, mentioned above, of white-skin privilege within the history of the United States

labor movement, “The White Blindspot” and Ignatiev’s “Black Worker, White Worker,” being

among the more robust. For a recent pathbreaking Marxist analysis of the causes and effects of

the Civil War, and its connection to the history of forms of social labor in the United States, see

Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism (Leiden: Brill, 2011). ↩

29. See The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wil-

son (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); Wilma Dunaway, Slavery in the American

Mountain South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). ↩

30. Cf. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); for the author’s concise synopsis of her

research, see Stephanie McCurry, “Reckoning with the Confederacy,” South Atlantic Quarterly

112.3 (Summer 2013), 481-488. ↩

31. Cf. John C. Inscoe, “‘Moving Through Deserter Country’: Fugitive Accounts of the Inner Civil War

in Southern Appalachia,” in Noe and Wilson, ed., op. cit., 158-186; also Steven Hahn, A Nation

Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migra-

tion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). ↩

32. Gregg L. Michel. Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee,

1964–1969 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005), 50, 247, n.47. ↩

33. A passage from an article in The Patriot newspaper from 1970. Thanks to Hy Thurman and

Ethan Young for the reference. ↩

34. The Patriot Party, op. cit., 239. Amiri Baraka made this argument in remarkably similar terms

four years later, in his “Toward Ideological Clarity”: “If we continue to act as if whites do not exist

in this society, we will be left trying to build a fantasy world in which the skin brotherhood will be

the answer to all problems rather than political consciousness.” This position paper was pub-

lished in Black World, November 1974, 91. ↩

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